


at the edge of our hope

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, Gen, Jaeger Pilots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-04
Packaged: 2018-02-11 18:12:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2078148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Britain waits. Rose doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	at the edge of our hope

**Author's Note:**

> (I imagined this as Ten/Rose, but honestly it could be Nine/Rose too; it's intentionally nonspecific).

The first attack comes while he’s still a graduate student.  
  
He stands in his vest and boxers in the kitchen of his dumpy little flat in Oxford, staring numbly at the television as the Golden Gate Bridge falls into the water in huge, twisted pieces.  
  
The kettle boils over while he stares at the screen, but he barely hears the whistle over the roar of blood and panic in his head.  
  
\---  
  
Rose is really still a kid when San Francisco gets hit.  
  
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t remember every single second of the five days she and her mum sat in front of the telly, watching and watching and waiting to see if maybe that’d make it all sink in. She remembers the way they left the news on for days and days and days, the way the whole estate seemed to wander in and out of the flat, creating a hum of hushed, nervous conversation just as omnipresent as the drone of the newsreaders.  
  
Rose remembers sitting on the ratty sofa at half two in the morning, half-asleep and curled into her mum’s side, and hearing her mutter, “Oh, but I do miss your dad.”  
  
\---  
  
Three days after he gets his doctorate, he’s approached by an intimidating-looking man wearing a military uniform. He’s handed a business card and a thick manila envelope, full of international-security mumbo-jumbo and complex technical blueprints — as well as a salary offer that, for someone whose last job was slinging tom yam goong at the Thai place down the road, is nothing short of mind-boggling.  
  
He says _no_ because it’s the _military_ , and he’s made up his mind that he’s _never_ going to work for the military, giant sea monsters or no giant sea monsters. The stiff in the uniform actually takes it shockingly well — just says _keep my card, Dr. Smith. Let us know if you change your mind._  
  
Three weeks after that, there’s an attack on the coast of Mexico. He actually goes so far as to dig the crumpled card out of his jacket pocket and stare at the number for a little while, weighing the pros and cons in his head while the sound of screams and buildings crumbling comes from the television.  
  
He doesn’t _call_ the number until after the Sydney attack.  
  
A week after Sydney he’s on a plane to Hong Kong, wearing a shiny new badge that reads _PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS._  
  
Underneath the PPDC emblem there’s an awful, fuzzy picture of him and a caption that reads _DR. JOHN SMITH — SCIENTIFIC CORPS._ However, it becomes very clear very quickly that most people don’t read farther down the badge than his title.  
  
It’s easy to slip into the new nickname — new role, new man, new world.  
  
(It all fits better than he’d like to admit).  
  
\---  
  
The Kaiju don’t attack the British Isles.  
  
They brace for it for months, hunkering down and preparing for the worst, a Blitz from the sea instead of the sky.  
  
“It’s all just like before,” Rose’s gran tells her. “’Cept now it’s bloody sea monsters, ‘stead of Germans.”  
  
The attacks never come, though. The monsters — the Kaiju — seem to keep to the Pacific, apparently uninterested in the frigid waters off the coast of Britain. Even as the coastal dwellers build up their defenses, even as Parliament fights tooth and nail over what the best way to prepare for the possibility of attack might be, the waters around them stay still, unbroken by the kind of terror that’s now regularly rising from the surface of the Pacific.  
  
Rose has always hated waiting, and this is the worst kind she’s ever had to do.  
  
\---  
  
They try recruiting him as a pilot, dozens and dozens of times.  
  
 _Intimate knowledge of the program,_ the techs say. _Untapped tactical potential,_ the marshals say.  
  
 _Killer instinct,_ the combat trainers say.  
  
He says no and no and no, over and over again, and it usually manages to fob them off for a while — long enough for his to disappear back into the lab or the control room, where there’s some distance between him and the fight.  
  
Then — then, pilots start dropping. Jaegers start dropping, like they're flies or gnats instead of million-ton metal beasts.  
  
It’s not till he loses count of how _many_ — people, not Jaegers — they’ve lost that he finally says _yes._  
  
\---  
  
Britain waits. Rose doesn’t.   
  
She has flaming rows with Mickey and her mum about it. Mickey sulks and snipes for _days_ before he finally comes round to her side, and even then he’s still just a little miffed about it.  
  
Her mum cries and yells and even _sobs_ , far longer and louder than Mickey. The refrains are usually _You’re goin’ to get yourself killed with this barmy robot nonsense_ (admittedly possible, though not convincing enough to make Rose change her mind) and _It’s bad enough I haven’t got your father and now you’re gonna go off and leave too_ (which is mostly implied, rather than said, unless the row’s been prefaced by a few pints or glasses of wine).  
  
In the end, though, even Jackie goes along, and on the day Rose ships out for Kodiak her mum is standing there on the dock with Mickey — blubbering and waving like a lunatic, but smiling, proud, all the same.  
  
\---  
  
When it starts to get _really_ bad, he loses co-pilot after co-pilot — so many, in fact, that whispers go around that the he and the _Old Girl_ are cursed.  
  
The compatibility’s never _perfect._ Romana, Sarah Jane, Tegan, Ace, Charley, Fitz — they’re all compatible, yes, but there are always jagged edges, bits where the cogs of their minds don’t quite fit together. He’s never quite experienced the drift the way he’s heard other pilots describe it — a complete merging of minds, without distance, almost without distinction. He’s never been able to meet another pair across of eyes across the sparring ring and _know_ , right away, that they’re _it_ , the mind that’ll slot into his like it’s made to be there.  
  
But that doesn’t make the feeling of their minds being ripped from his any less horrifying, and it doesn’t make it any less like losing a limb as well as a friend when they’re gone.  
  
The Doctor goes on hiatus from piloting for a while, after the latest in a long line of co-pilots ends up in a tiny heap somewhere on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. He takes off his helmet and puts his lab coat back on, hoping that if he _looks_ the part it’ll _make_ the part — that he’ll sink back into charts and graphs and technical readouts and forget what it feels like to have your mind sliced in half.   
  
\---  
  
Jaeger Academy or no Jaeger Academy, for a while Rose is certain that she’ll never _really_ be a Ranger.  
  
By the time she’s qualified, the tide has turned back in the Kaiju’s favor, and pilots and Jaegers and both being cut down at an alarming rate. She hopes against hope for a posting, clinging to her high marks on her aptitude tests, to her exceptional simulation record, to her sterling service record with regard to other PPDC duties at the Peru, Sydney, and Tokyo Shatterdomes.  
  
But it’s not until they’re down to three Jaegers — _three_ — and the program’s technically no longer operational that she actually makes it onto a real list of potential candidates.  
  
A worn-down looking man with a mustache and an immaculate uniform greets her when she steps off the helicopter at the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Lethbridge-Stewart is the one responsible for getting her name down for the co-pilot vacancy, and he’s the one who introduces her to the technical corps, the one who shows her to her quarters, and the one who, the next morning, walks her to the combat room and says, “the Doctor will be here shortly.”  
  
\---  
  
Alistair wheedles and whiles and (gently) threatens him for months, trying to get him to consider piloting the _Old Girl_ again.  
  
 _You’re her pilot_ , he says. _There’s no one can handle her like you do,_ he says.  
  
 _Get out of my bloody lab,_ the Doctor says.  
  
But in the end, he feels he owes it to Alistair — and, if he’s being completely frank, to the whole increasingly endangered, panicked _planet_ — to at least give it a go. So he deigns to make an appearance in the combat room after the candidates arrive, even if he’s fairly pessimistic about the possibility of any of them being less than objectionable.  
  
He couldn’t have imagined what actually _happens._ Couldn’t possibly have prepared for the frisson of hot _exhilaration_ — of something almost like fear, but hotter and lighter, positively blistering in its surprise and intensity — when he comes level with that other pair of eyes rocks him to the core.  
  
“What’s your name?” he asks the girl on the edge of the sparring ring. She’s young, younger than most of the other candidates, bottle-blonde and just a little scrappy-looking.  
  
“Rose,” she answers back, and he rolls the name around in his head, trying to see if he can tell how she’s going to fit in there.  
  
He tosses her a short staff, and she makes catching it look easy as breathing.  
  
\---  
  
“You nervous?” he asks Rose, as she experimentally moves her arms inside her pilot’s suit.  
  
She makes an aborted little move with her head, half a nod and half something else. “Little bit, I s’pose. First proper time, and all.”  
  
“Don’t be,” he says. “Nothing to be scared of. It’s really just a handshake, after all.” He grins, wide and exaggerated, so that it’s big enough for her to see through the low light and the glass of his helmet.  
  
“Just a handshake, huh?” Rose grins back, nervousness buried under good humor. “Well, that can’t be too bad, then. I’ll just grab your…hand, and we’ll get on with it.”  
  
“That’s right,” he says, just as the lights in the cabin start to dim, as the preliminary checks start running and the _Old Girl_ prepares to really come to life. “Just grab my hand and _run._ ”


End file.
